The academic intermezzo

Yet Cambridge is fun nonetheless. A key feature of lectures at Western universities like this one, which any Czech has to notice (even Hoffmeister, whom I mentioned in my previous article, noticed it), is the amount of jokes used by lecturers to spice their talk up. At the start of the year, one professor urged us not to ever forget turning our phones off during his lectures. The reason he gave, however, wasn’t that it interrupts the lecture; rather, he said that it would become difficult for him to always come up with a fresh joke about mobile phones ringing. This sort of worry is completely unjustified though: all the lecturers are very good at making funny comments not just about phones, but about pretty much anything that occurs during their class.

Towards the end of the second term, one is becoming used to the demanding pace of work, which is incomparable with what he was used to in the secondary school. There are student cliques sitting in the same place in the library. Some cover stacks of papers with numbers and letters, some study diagrams and graphs, and students of humanities either work their way through piles of books, or type their essays. Although I also get a chance to enjoy letters and numbers when studying logic, my studies are primarily essay-based. Their themes vary from the relatively concrete ones, such as ‘is punishment justifiable?’, to the slightly more abstract ones, such as ‘how does something emerge from nothing?’. In the latter case I am usually satisfied when I manage not to get completely lost.

One internet student parody shows how most people picture life in Cambridge: a group of English gentlemen drink tea which sitting in their gowns in a wallpapered room. Frankly, this is not as misleading as you might think – you can come across similar scenes in this place. Yet the real essence of Cambridge can be only very hardly captured. Its multitude of faces makes this task practically impossible.

The sort of classical face is illustrated by the activities of the Cambridge Union Society, which I have recently joined. This ancient organisation lies in the centre of university life, both metaphorically and literally, because its main building in a Victorian house next to the oldest colleges. Apart from many smaller events and projects, it organised a grandiose debate every week. Experts and famous people are invited to them to present their cases. I try to attend the debate as often as I can, because it is usually worth it. For example, the biologist Richard Dawkins, who achieved fame for his ideological interpretation of science, here recently defended the view that religion is evil. The celebrity Katie Price, who achieved fame for being famous, recently defended her view that celebrities are beneficial for society. By the way, both Dawkins and Price lost their debates. The Union events often stir controversy – the recent talk by Marine Le Penn attracted hundreds of protesters, who we hindered from accessing the building by police.

Another popular Cambridge activity is formal dinners. Even in Churchill College, one of the modern and ‘progressive’ colleges, we have these dinners three times a week, and they are widely attended. However, they are less formal that the ones in the ancient colleges. We don’t have to wear gowns, for example. And they also don’t kick you out for pennying. Pennying is a traditional game, supposedly several centuries old, which Oxbridge students like playing during formals. The point is to drop a one penny coin in somebody else’s glass of wine: if you succeed, this person must empty her glass. From time to time, this game causes too much glee and mess, the staff in old colleges lead an eternal war with it and keep trying to extirpate it by many different techniques.